Say goodbye to MEDMS Staff Collection and hello to NEO Staff; training is next

In the early 2000s, the Maine Education Data Management System (MEDMS) was created to communicate with local school administration districts and cooperatively manage their staff- and student-level data for state and federal regulatory compliance. Since then, there have been many changes to regulation, as well as advances in technology. In 2005, the Maine DOE removed the student collection piece of MEDMS and added an application known as Infinite Campus to serve as the Department’s Student Information System (SIS). Now, NEO is around the corner.

The Department recently made the decision to replace the staff collection piece of MEDMS with a new application called NEO Staff. Beginning with the 2015-16 school year, all staff will be entered in this new system and MEDMS will no longer be used for this purpose. There are other pieces currently in MEDMS like HQT, Certification Reports, etc. that will still reside in MEDMS for the immediate future but all will eventually be replaced. The Department is also undergoing the development of a new Certification System, so the compliance reporting piece currently in MEDMS will remain in MEDMS for the 2015-16 school year or until the new Certification System has been implemented.

There are many changes coming in the 2015-16 school year. In order that accurate student and staff data is reported to the Maine DOE, it is important that all staff that has anything to do with staff data entry should attend one of these training sessions (see below). During the initial rollout of this application, the ability to upload staff data will not be available. This is a feature that we hope to have available in the 2016-17 school year. Data entry into the new NEO Staff System in the 2015-16 school year will be a manual process. Demographic data for staff that was not terminated in 2014-15 will be brought forward so you should only need to enter assignment data.

In addition to the new NEO Staff application, we will be discussing:

New NEO Graduation / Dropout Validation (new NEO module) – those who were charged with doing their schools completers and dropout validation reports last year should also attend

Behavior Incident Reporting – staff that is charged with entering student behavior incidents in Infinite Campus should attend this session

Truancy Incident Reporting – staff that is charged with entering student Truancy incidents in Infinite Campus should attend this session